Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife Heather Mills has been branded a gold-digger, a liar, a fantasist and a trollop in the press - but does she deserve such vitriolic coverage?
SHE'S TALL, blonde, with a knockout figure and the kind of enviable facial bone structure that is only likely to increase her appeal as she ages. She has campaigned against land mines, is a vocal vegetarian and has spoken out on behalf of many causes, including animal rights and amputee aid. So why is Heather Mills the most hated woman in Britain right now?
Many point readily to the sacrilege she committed when she married one of the country's most beloved icons, Sir Paul McCartney (now 65). After all, Beatles' wives have never been held in high regard on the Fab Four's home turf, with the frustrations of tens of thousands of obsessional fans once focused on the unflappable figure of Yoko Ono. Yet when Mills first appeared on the scene as the new lady in McCartney's life only a year after the death of his first wife, Linda, reaction was muted. Media commentator Roy Greenslade has his own explanation for why the press turned.
"It's got nothing to do with the fact that she married a Beatle," he claims. "She was a suspicious character from early on, when she first surfaced, but nobody would say that because she was a one-legged person."
According to Greenslade, the tabloids were initially cautious, taking an uncharacteristically measured approach given the easy target presented by the sudden appearance of a former model 25 years his junior at Sir Paul's side, so soon after his first wife's death. "She got the benefit of the doubt because papers were also aware that they'd been pretty sharp about his previous wife too."
It was a moratorium that could never last, and as the unlikely marriage dissolved, so too did any benefit of the doubt. Once the divorce was announced, it was open season.
Branding her a gold-digger, a liar, a fantasist and a trollop, the tabloids went to town on Mills, gleefully picking through her glamour model past and charity work, and deriding her high-spending lifestyle.
When Mills made an appearance on GMTV decrying the hounding by the paparazzi and claiming it was driving her to suicidal thoughts, it only made matters worse. Threatening to investigate "each and every one of those journalists" who were abusing her, she brought a folder of press cuttings into the studios as she wept before the cameras. Calling for a boycott of tabloid newspapers, she even aired a video she had made of photographers who she said had been plaguing her.
If it was a plea for sympathy, it backfired in dramatic fashion.
"She's the only person who ever created sympathy for the paparazzi," says Greenslade. Her press adviser, former News of the World editor Phil Hall, resigned following her televised outburst, which she herself had originally requested.
"The fact of the matter is there are a lot of victims of the media but she's not one of them," says publicist Max Clifford. "The way she has conducted herself, the way that she's dealt with the media - really and truly she has only got herself to blame for the mess that she's in. Even going onto GMTV expressly against the wishes of her PR adviser shows she thinks she knows better than anybody else."
EVEN THE judge who ruled on the high profile divorce settlement, while admitting that Mills has had "a bad press", suggested that she is her own worst enemy. "She cannot have done herself any good in the eyes of potential purchasers of her services as a TV presenter, public speaker and a model, by her outbursts in her TV interviews in October and November 2007," said Mr Justice Bennett in his 58-page ruling.
These were the comments Mills tried to keep out of the media, but she was denied an appeal to stop the ruling becoming public. It's little wonder, given that the judge also claimed she indulged in "make believe", described her character as "explosive and volatile" and her evidence in places as "less than candid".
The tabloids, unsurprisingly, had a field day. "Pornocchio" screamed the Sun, as it delighted in the comeuppance meted out to "grasping Heather Mills", while the Daily Mail labelled her a "serial fantasist". The judge's words appeared to bear out the press's early distrust of Mills, and the media was quick to capitalise.
"I think the judge said everything newspapers had been saying for ages and the fact that it comes out of the judge's mouth after he had listened to evidence has really vindicated the tabloids in their hostility," says Greenslade.
It's a hostility that many believe was provoked entirely by Mills herself, who, far from being camera shy, has instead courted the media in a manner that at best seemed almost wilfully naive. It has been argued that the real problem is that Mills, though exhibiting courage and a kind of furious loyalty, is ultimately just so incurably unendearing.
"She's seen as hard, she's seen as abrasive, she's seen as disillusioned," lists Clifford. "There's nothing about her that I warm to."
EVEN THOSE who would question the pernicious press attacks she was subject to have admitted she's an unlikeable person. Writing in the Guardian on the subject, novelist Maureen Lindley pointed to the style of "outright, knock-down pillory" that Mills came in for as something that has been happening to women for centuries. Although she is reluctant to pounce with the rest, she acknowledges that Mills is, put simply, difficult to like.
"I don't find her that attractive myself, but that's not the argument," says Lindley, who believes that the treatment meted out to Mills is at least partly attributable to her gender. "People either want a saint or a sinner, and I think it's particularly the case with women," she observes, citing eyebrow-raising sexual liaisons, like those of Bill Clinton and even Charles Stuart Parnell, where the men were ultimately forgiven, while the women took more than their fair share of the blame. "Paul McCartney is a great national hero and we let him off. If Heather Mills had been rather plain and dumpy, he wouldn't have been attracted to her, yet we forgive him for that, for going for the beautiful young woman," she says.
Mills doesn't get off quite so easily. "We forgive him for not falling in love with a not-so-attractive woman, but we won't forgive her for being dazzled by his fame." It's certainly true that McCartney has escaped, with even the judge commending his balanced evidence and mentioning what he termed "justifiable irritation, if not anger" on the part of the musician.
However, though the judge's verdict may carry much more credence than that of a tabloid newspaper, it is still coming from a male, and in many ways a traditional, establishment source.
Regardless of the judge's objectivity, the verdict is in on Heather Mills, even if the jury is still out on where she went wrong. Was it simply because she was a flawed female and thereby condemned, as an obviously untenable candidate for a Madonna, to being labelled a whore? Or does gender have any bearing on the fact that, at the end of the day, Mills has revealed herself to be sorely lacking in the kind of warmth and charm that wins hearts?
Perhaps the only certainty to emerge from all the Heather Mills mud-slinging is that the ones to come out smiling are ultimately the tabloids. "I think that when it comes to Heather they've been very accurate and very honest," says Clifford. "Have they been cruel? Yes they have, but have they been honest? Yes."
For Greenslade, the timing of the Mills-McCartney ruling was particularly interesting, given that it came on the same day that the parents of Madeleine McCann were handed an apology and a settlement from Express Newspapers for intimating that they were responsible for their daughter's death. "You've got to put [ the Heather Mills story] in that context," says Greenslade. "They treated the McCanns like Heather Mills, the McCanns were 'celebritised'. Popular newspapers live off of celebrities, and they don't really care too much about them. They build them up and knock them down."
The two cases are markedly different, clearly, but the analogy is nonetheless pertinent: with Justice Bennet rowing in to give his own verdict in the divorce case, Heather Mills is unlikely to get the apologies she has long publicly demanded from the British press, but whether the £550,000 (€707,000) the McCann settlement has cost Express Newspapers will change the way tabloids treat their subjects is another question entirely.
For Lindley, the ultimate question is how much the public will allow selective press reporting to do the judging for them. "I only know Heather Mills through newspapers," she says. "Like 99 per cent of the population, I know only what I read about her, and I am personally aggravated at being manipulated into hating someone that I don't know.
"The bottom line is, make someone a whole person, lads, let us really see who we're supposed to be disliking, and then let us make our own decision."